


an idea whose time has come

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment
Genre: 5+1 Things, Family Given and Chosen, Getting Together, How We All Left Buzzfeed, M/M, Off-page Banging, Pining, alcohol consumption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:50:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21821467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: Or: 5 times Ryan Bergara sort of joked that they should blow this popsicle stand,+1 time he definitelydidn’tjoke about it.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 102
Kudos: 972





	an idea whose time has come

**Author's Note:**

> idk, folks, how are we feeling this week? we feeling good? a little punchy? 
> 
> The title is from the song [“All of My Days and All of My Days Off”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9Yc5eHHvl0) by A.C. Newman, which is a terribly romantic song about committing to someone _real_ hard. You should definitely not listen to this song and mumble _they secretly got work married_ to yourself like a lil’ gremlin and cry real tears about it, because that would be embarrassing. I, myself, would never do this.
> 
> Thanks to the disk orb for helping me brainstorm things Steven Lim might be metaphorically horny for, and to Catt and Eva for the beta.

*

**1\. To escape the intern grind.  
**(February 2015)  
  
Shane’s only been at Buzzfeed like a week when the kid sitting next to him in the bay of intern desks decides they’re going to be friends.

Shane says “kid” because this guy Ryan can’t be more than two years out of college. He still has that optimistic glimmer about his person that says he has a degree in film studies, a blissfully supportive home life, and full confidence that it’ll all work out for him in the end. With L.A. in his blood and the Santa Ana winds at his back, how could it not?

Shane, pushing thirty and looking back at a series of dead-end jobs and a decade of fumbling to figure out what he wants, gets exhausted just looking at the guy. He’s sure he wasn’t that laser-focused when he was that age.

And then there’s the bro thing. Ryan’s a frat guy, a jock, and—god help them all—exuberantly extroverted. Everything about him is dialed up to eleven. He eats like a horse, _exclusively_ fast food garbage, groaning with pleasure and rubbing his stomach like Homer Simpson over lunch at his desk. His brow is always covered in a very fine sheen of sweat and masculine camaraderie, as if he either recently finished playing some kind of team sport or is on his way to play yet _another_ team sport.

More than almost anyone Shane’s ever met, Ryan speaks before he thinks. Shane’s seen him inadvertently blunder into insulting like three people this week alone, but no one seems to be much offended by it. They always shrug it off with indulgent smiles like Ryan’s their favorite cousin, the one who’s a little shit but so oblivious that you can’t stay mad for long.

Basically Shane assumes they have nothing in common, which is fine. He wants to have a good working relationship with his deskmates, with his cohort of fellows. He’s not looking for a soulmate here.

It’s Friday and they’re stuck working late, long after any employee with job security has gone home for the weekend. Shane’s supposed to be doing last-minute fact checking and music credits for a video scheduled to go up tomorrow morning, and Ryan’s neck-deep in some edit.

Ryan keeps looking at his clock and sighing. It’s distracting. After about the fourth time, Shane looks up.

“Hot date?” he asks.

“Actually, kind of,” Ryan says with a frown, either paying Shane’s annoyance no mind or failing to notice it in the first place. “It’s my girlfriend’s birthday and we’ve got a reservation at eight. I can’t get this transition right, and Matt wanted to approve a cut tomorrow. Man, this sucks.”

“Let me see.” Feeling a little bad for snapping, Shane scoots his chair over to hover over Ryan’s left shoulder.

Ryan plays the clip in question. The transition doesn’t look bad to Shane. Seamless, even stylish in an understated kind of way. It’s good.

“I think you’ve got it, man,” Shane says. “It looks great. You should get out of here. If you leave now you’ll still have time to make yourself pretty.”

Ryan frowns. He plays the clip again.

“No, it’s not there yet,” he says. “It’s not right. See how it jumps there, right at the end?”

That’s how Shane learns that Ryan is talented, with a good eye. He’s also a perfectionist, much more meticulous in his work than literally everything else about him would suggest. It’s a detail that makes him more interesting to Shane, because it is anomalous.

“If you say so,” Shane says, scooting back over to his own computer.

“Sorry for bugging you. I’ll just, um. Sorry.” 

When Ryan says it—that resigned, cringing tone—Shane realizes he got that one wrong too. Ryan isn’t oblivious to the fact that he is a lot; in fact he is _hyper-aware_ of it. He’s not brashly overconfident, he’s just faking it until he makes it. Not so unlike Shane himself at 23 or 24, after all, it’s just that Ryan’s chosen biceps and broishness for his defense instead of wry humor and weaponized sarcasm. 

“You weren’t bugging me,” Shane lies, feeling more charitable. “Don’t worry about it. It’s been a long week. Is it always like this here?”

“Yep.” Ryan spins himself around in his desk chair, reaching out to clip the desk with his hand on every rotation. “Maybe I’ll just quit. Being a fellow blows. I’ll quit and make a low-budget horror film based on my experiences here over the last month. Worked for those Blair Witch Project guys.”

Shane cracks a smile. “In the climactic sequence, our hero has to make it to the break room before the coffee runs out, but he keeps getting stopped by his team lead to perform menial and humiliating tasks.”

“No, he has to be on camera for a video taste-testing flavored condoms,” Ryan says grimly. “Whatever, I shouldn’t complain. It’s an opportunity a lot of people would kill for. I guess I didn’t think it would be this grueling.”

“Or this unnecessarily degrading,” Shane agrees. “So what was the best flavor?”

“Ugh. Probably peppermint. At least your mouth goes numb.”

“And the worst?”

“Banana. God.” Ryan pulls a face of absolute disgust. “Like banana Runts, plastic, and ass.”

“Sexy,” Shane says with a laugh.

“Yeah, well, now my grandma’s gonna see me blowing a condom up like a balloon in front of the whole internet, which is exactly what I envisioned when I applied here.”

“Chin up,” Shane says, trying to keep a straight face. “At least she’ll know you’re practicing safe sex.”

“Fuck off.” Ryan flicks a paper clip at him. It misses Shane by a wide margin, sailing over his head and into some dark corner. “How about it? We could stage a walkout together, pursue a life producing low-budget horror flicks. To stay in the black we can make those gross videos they show kids in Drivers Ed to scare them shitless. _Blood on the Pavement 3: Don’t Text and Drive_, or whatever.”

“Sure,” Shane says easily, rocking back in his chair. “What are we getting here, marketable skills and relevant experience? Pft! Who needs ‘em? I’d be honored to join the _Blood on the Pavement_ team.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“You don’t even know me, man. I could be a serial killer or something.”

“So you’re a natural fit for the horror genre, then. You’ll have the inside scoop.”

Ryan smiles at him then. It’s an easy, genuine smile, his teeth so shockingly white and even that Shane’s not sure he’s ever seen a bigger or brighter one in person. Ryan doesn’t quite have movie star looks, but he has a movie star grin, and Shane’s momentarily flustered by it.

It’s idle chatter, of course, born of a long, frustrating week of being the lowest in the pecking order. This is the dream job and they both know it. If they can get through the six months of this fellowship, if they can convince their bosses they’re worth keeping around, doors will spring open for them.

“You’ve gotta go, man,” Shane says, looking at his watch. “Leave your computer on. I’ll finish the transition up for you before I leave and send it along to Matt.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I’ll be here for hours yet anyway. You can’t disappoint your lady. It doesn’t need that much anyway, you’re just all,” and Shane makes a little hand twirl around his own head, “in your head about it.”

“I can get like that,” Ryan says, suddenly bashful in a way Shane wants to examine more closely. He feels like he’s learned something valuable today about rushing too quickly to judgment, about his tendency to be dismissive of people. It’s possible they have things to talk about after all.

“Well, join the club,” Shane says. “Everyone here is a basket case creative type with time management issues who’s petrified of failure one hundred percent of the time. You can’t quit now. You’ve found your people.”

He means himself, and Ryan shoots him a grateful look. He stands up then, gathering his things, stretching his arms over his head and rotating them to work the kinks out of his back and neck.

“Thanks, dude,” he says, clapping Shane on the shoulder on his way past. “You’re a lifesaver. I owe you one.”

“You can pay me back in stock options for the _Blood on the Pavement_ franchise.”

And just like that, with no fanfare or fuss, they are friends.

*

**2\. For emotional blackmail.  
**(June 2016) **  
  
**Ryan’s in a real fucking pissy mood today.

Shane can tell from the moment he sits down that it’s gonna be one of those days where he tiptoes around on eggshells, where Ryan doesn’t want to joke or make conversation, where he’s going to be constantly moving and making agitated noises and driving everyone around him bonkers.

In a silent, conciliatory gesture, Shane brings him a mug of coffee. When he sets it on Ryan’s desk, Ryan jumps a foot in the air and then desperately grabs for it. He doesn’t quite _say_ thanks, but he does let out a pathetic moan of unmistakable gratitude when he takes his first sip.

Sometimes when a video goes wrong Ryan wants to talk about it, and sometimes he wants to stew and mutter to himself and eventually get drunk about it. Shane can help with any or all of those things, but he’s got to wait for Ryan to come to him and tell him which he needs.

After lunch, the dam breaks.

“God _damn_ it,” Ryan says. He says it at his computer screen, but in the sort of loud, performative way that suggests he’s finally ready for Shane to ask.

“What’s up, man?”

“Brent can’t do Unsolved,” Ryan says. “He doesn’t have room on his schedule next month to film, and he said that listening to me talk about murders _creeps him out_. What a wimp.”

Unsolved is the latest passion project Ryan’s been working on. He’s put in a lot of long hours over the last couple of years on some really stupid videos he didn’t care about, all so he could finally get a shot at this: some really stupid videos he cares a _lot_ about.

It seems like quite a few people care about them, actually, judging by the engagement numbers on the first handful of videos. Ryan’s eager to do more, and corporate’s eager too. Shane always thought of true crime as a rather tired genre, but in Ryan’s capable hands there’s something loose and slapdash about it that he can appreciate.

“So make it without him,” Shane says. “It’s not like Brent’s a known quantity on camera. He’s pretty good, but it won’t make or break the show if he’s not there.”

Ryan’s already shaking his head. “I need a foil,” he says. “That’s the whole—that’s the point. That’s what makes it different. I need someone to call me on my bullshit.”

“I mean, if you’re just looking for someone to call you dumb on camera, surely there are any number of willing and able volunteers here,” Shane says. “Most of us do it for free anyway.”

Ryan looks askance in his direction and flips him the bird. Then he freezes, finger still in the air, staring intently at Shane with more purpose and clarity than Shane’s quite comfortable with. Before Shane’s very eyes, the pissy mood vanishes, to be replaced with tentative excitement.

The finger transitions from a rude gesture to a recriminatory point. Shane leans back a little in his seat.

“_You_,” Ryan says. “Of course. You are better at calling me an idiot than anyone I know.”

“Well,” Shane says, flattered, “when you love what you do—”

“Seriously, man, how about it? Come on board for a few eps, if you’re free. The shoots are tentatively scheduled for next month, and then we’re planning a big on-location trip in September for a Halloween release.”

It doesn’t sound like that big of a commitment. Shane takes a glance at his Outlook calendar. He’s got some time to spare in the next couple of months, having wrapped his last big project a few days prior. And he’d rather listen to Ryan tell him creepy murder stories than get roped into the bullshit clickbait _du jour_ anyway.

“I don’t knooow,” Shane says, singsong, pretending to hold out for the pleasure of seeing Ryan squirm.

“Come on, man, you have to!” Shane loves when Ryan’s eyes get like that, all fervent and wide. “Please. You’re funnier than Brent anyway.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.” Shane examines his fingernails, trying to look uninterested. He briefly considers making Ryan beg, but then Ryan does a quick 180 to wild, desperate threats instead.

“If you don’t say yes, I’m going to quit right now. I’m going to walk out that door in a huge flounce and they’re going to put some new creep next to you.”

“I’ll live.”

“Some dude who hums loudly and has bad breath and thinks Crash deserved to win that Oscar!”

Shane whistles. “Low blow. Not like it can be more annoying than your mid-meal groaning.”

“Shut up, Shane.”

“And you did say Batman vs. Superman was, and I’m quoting directly here, ‘pretty good.’”

“That’s not what I said! My position has always been that Henry Cavill—“

“Has the biceps and shoulders of a Greek God, yes, we _know_.”

Ryan falls petulantly silent.

Shane doesn’t really feel the need to make him ask again. A little good-natured ribbing has satisfied him just fine. Truth be told, he’s tickled that Ryan thought to ask him in the first place, although he’d never admit it.

“Okay, no need to storm out of here in a huff. I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your budding career as a plucky boy detective.”

“So you’ll do the show?” Ryan asks, practically vibrating, and Shane couldn’t hold out against all that barefaced earnestness even if he wanted to. It’s so rare for Ryan to let his guard down enough to admit to wanting or needing something that Shane moves right past tickled and into something else, something stronger. He feels the need to—cherish it, almost. Certainly to encourage it, to water that little seed of vulnerability and see what might grow from it.

“Yes,” Shane says. “Yes, yeah, I’ll do your thing. Whatever. It’s only a month and change anyway.”

Shane can do that, some low-commitment fun where the primary burden of the work falls on someone else. He’s happy to show up and be a glib asshole for a couple of hours here and there. Some might say he was born for it.

“Where’s the September filming trip to?”

Ryan launches into this long and incomprehensible explanation about Mexico, and some house a crazy lady built, and something about a portal. As he finishes, he mumbles something that sounds a lot like it could be “_ghost hunting_.” Surely Shane’s misheard.

“I—excuse you?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Well now I’m worried about it.”

Ryan’s giggling uncontrollably now, trying to stifle it into his arm, like he’s gotten away with something. Shane hates how charming it is.

“It’s fine!” Ryan calms himself down, wiping his eyes. “Hey, dude, seriously. You’re saving my ass here.”

“Don’t make me regret it,” Shane says—but he already knows he won’t, ghosts or no ghosts.

(Obviously there are no ghosts.)

*****

**3\. Because demons.  
**(September 2016)

Ryan drops his GoPro and _flees_.

Shane’s not sure he’s ever seen someone book it out of a house that fast. He’s certainly never seen someone do it because a flashlight turned on.

The ghost hunter guy—Shane’s already forgotten his name, Evan? Eric?—is in the corner absolutely losing his fuckin’ mind laughing. Even Mark’s shoulders are shaking from the effort of not laughing out loud, and Shane’s not even sure he’s ever seen Mark so much as smile with teeth before.

And it is funny. It’s hilarious. But Shane’s also a little concerned, like genuinely worried about Ryan’s well-being. The guy had looked like he was about to pee himself.

“Cut, I guess,” Shane says. He’s reluctant to give up the footage, and Ryan might even be mad at him for it later—but now, in the moment, he thinks Ryan would take a swing at him if he got up in his face with a camera. “You guys stay here.”

Shane follows Ryan out of the house, picking his way down porch steps that have been allowed to begin to rot in the name of spooky aesthetics. It’s not a bad house, really, Shane thinks. Nothing a few coats of paint and a fumigator can’t fix.

Ryan’s squatting by the car, balled over very small. Shane can tell before he gets close enough to hear that Ryan’s talking to himself, from the movement of his lips not fully hidden against his wrist.

Shane pauses, hovering, unsure what to do. He’d been unprepared to navigate an emotional minefield on this shoot. It occurs to him that he can’t remember the last time he saw fear, like _real_ existential fear, and he’s not sure how to react. He’d forgotten it has an odor—that metallic, singed smell, like burned off-brand microwave popcorn.

He realizes that Ryan legitimately believes himself to be in danger. It makes the hairs on the back of Shane’s arms raise in sympathy, as if his own nervous system is preparing itself in case the fear is catching.

“So it’s flight, then?” he asks Ryan, keeping his voice light. “I would have thought fight. Guess those muscles are just for show.”

“You can’t fight demons,” Ryan says, muffled. He rises out of his squat, but he’s still hunched over, crumpled in on himself as if he’s thinking about getting sick.

“Excuse you. Buffy the Vampire Slayer fought demons all the time,” Shane says, trying not to be unsupportive by rejecting Ryan’s fundamental premise. “And you’ve got holy water, so.”

“I’m not going back in there.”

“Okay,” Shane says, cautious. “Nobody’s gonna make you. We can leave right now if you want.”

Ryan laughs, a shaky, uncertain little laugh. “Leave here? Nah, that’s small potatoes. I’m leaving Buzzfeed, dude. I’m leaving the business. I’m going to quit and become a CPA or some shit.”

“Ryan, I mean this with love, but you have none of the skills required of a CPA. You are literally the least qualified person I can imagine for that line of work. Better to accept that embarrassing yourself for the internet is your calling.”

“Well, I’m glad this is entertaining for you.”

Shane shakes his head, regretting that Ryan didn’t see or accept that for the compliment it was intended to be.

“Not what I meant, man. Like I said, I’m not here to drag you back inside. I’m just saying it’s—it’s really good content, Ryan. I would really hate to deprive the people of your wordless screaming, which is, and I mean this, high art. Whatever genre this is that you’ve invented here, I’m into it.”

Ryan rolls his eyes. The whites of them make Shane’s own eyes snap shut in response: some atavistic instinct to stay hidden and safe. Shane’s not afraid, but his entire body is hyperaware that _Ryan_ is afraid. That’s the only explanation he can find for why his own heart’s beating double-time.

When he opens his eyes again Ryan is unfurling himself to standing, shaking out his hands like they’re giving him pins and needles. 

“’Atta boy,” Shane says. It feels condescending as soon as he’s said it, but Ryan doesn’t seem to mind. When he gets a hand on Ryan’s shoulder blade, a subconscious show of support, he’s surprised when Ryan leans into it rather than away.

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Ryan says, steeling himself like he’s going into battle instead of re-entering a tourist destination with faded floral print wallpaper.

“Oho! Ryan, you made a funny.” After all, they are _literally_ in Kansas. Shane bumps him lightly with his hip, jostling Ryan up the first step. “Proud of you, buddy. Wish we got that one on camera.”

In the doorway, Ryan squares his shoulders. He reaches for the doorknob, but before he grabs it he looks back at Shane for one final confirmation, one last show of support. By all rights Shane should be annoyed—this is the actual stupidest thing to be afraid of—but he’s only tired, and fond, and (rather unbelievably) _proud_.

He gives Ryan a thumbs up and a wink.

Ryan goes back in the house.  
  


**4\. All the Try Guys are doing it.  
**(June 2018)

The Try Guys launch the trailer for their new channel in June, and everybody at work crowds around Katie’s computer to watch.

They’re all sort of astonished. Not by the fact of it—they’d all known it was coming, there are no secrets at Buzzfeed—but by the unrelenting _speed_ of it, the way it snowballs in on itself, the views and subscriber counts going up and up and up. Shane watches their Patreon explode with fans eager to support them—and with real money, not only clicks and eyeballs.

“Local boys made good,” Ryan says to him, shaking his head in disbelief. “This is like watching the hometown hero be first pick in the NFL draft.”

“Those sure are words.”

“Shut up, Shane, you watched all of Friday Night Lights. You texted me a sob emoji when you were done. Don’t act like you don’t know what football is.”

“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose, baby!”

They’re doing a shoot with Kelsey that day, for her upcoming season of In Control. Ryan’s notably distant and weird the whole time, half there and half somewhere else entirely. At first Shane attributes it to filming with someone he doesn’t know well; it puts Ryan off his rhythm sometimes, nervous that he’ll grate or his sense of humor will offend.

It’s more than that, though. Shane catches Ryan staring into space and snaps his fingers.

“Hey man, what’s up with you today?”

“I wonder what it would be like,” Ryan says, apropos of, as far as Shane can tell, nothing.

“You’re going to need to be _much_ more specific.”

“You know, to pull a Try Guys. To leave Buzzfeed, strike out on your own. That’s a big risk, starting your own…thing.”

Shane snorts. Ryan can’t even bring himself to say the word _company_ out loud, let alone conceive of all the bullshit that would go into starting one. Shane wants to break into hives just imagining navigating the hassle it all, the health insurance and the sponsorships and the taxes. 

“Ryan, you want to make videos, not do paperwork. You hate all that shit, and Keith says it’s been a nightmare. Think of the spreadsheets.”

Ryan gives a delicate little shudder at the word.

“The creative freedom would be nice, though,” he says. “Everything those guys make from here on out, they own. They can do whatever they want, and at the end of the day it belongs to them.”

“What do you want to be doing here that Buzzfeed won’t let you do?” Shane asks, incredulous. As far as the suits are concerned, Ryan can write his own checks. They’re doing four seasons of Unsolved this year alone. “The new network launches next month. You’re like Leo DiCaprio on the bow of the Titanic, my friend. You’re the king of the world.”

“Two hours later that guy was fish food,” Ryan points out.

“Okay, well, bad example. And he got to see Kate Winslet’s boobs first.”

“Yeah, that is true.”

“If you want, I can put on a short little silk robe and ask you to paint me like one of your French girls, but—”

“Jesus.”

“And then I’ll shrug it off my shoulder and let it drop dramatically to the floor, and—”

“Okay, forget it!” Ryan says, laughing. “Jesus Christ. Forget I mentioned it. Can’t a man express one little sliver of wistfulness around here? Nothing I’ve made here is mine. Unsolved isn’t mine. It isn’t even _ours_.”

“The grass is always greener, but the realities of it are a lot different. The Try Guys had at least four times as many monthly views as Unsolved, and there’s four of them and one of you, so it’d be four times as hard.”

Ryan looks at Shane for what feels like a long time, considering him. “Yeah, I guess there’s only one of me.”

“Right. And one of those four is Ned Fulmer, and that dude is horny for spreadsheets. Whereas you are horny for, like, normal stuff. I assume.”

“Gross,” Ryan says. “Yeah, you’re right. We don’t need it, we’ve got BUN. It’s just fun to daydream about sometimes.”

Shane feels strongly that they are good at this thing they do together: they make great content. Sometimes that’s enough. Shane doesn’t need to always be on to the next thing, and then the next. He’s satisfied, even happy, the way things are.

He doesn’t _need_ more.

But sure. The daydreams—all manner of them, when he indulges—are fun.

*****

**5\. Because Buzzfeed is a peak-late-stage-capitalism corporate wasteland.  
**(July 2018)

Shane gets the email on a Friday evening. It feels like a real cowardly dick move, although he’s sure it’s because some schmuck upstairs wanted to hit send and then bail before Shane’s response can ruin his weekend.

He’s planning to sit at home alone and sulk about it with an entire bottle of bourbon, but without even meaning to do it he’s dialed Ryan’s number instead.

“What’s up, man?” Ryan answers. And then, off to the side, distracted: “Yo, shut up, it’s a work thing!”

It’s only 7 pm, but clearly the pregaming has already started. Shane can hear vague party noises in the background: voices, the residual bass from speakers, the clink of errant glassware. He feels vaguely hurt to have been immediately classified as a _work thing_, even though that is indeed why he’s calling.

“They said I can’t move forward with the second season of Ruining History,” Shane says, as matter-of-fact as he can manage, disguising the wobble of disappointment. “They said it’s too expensive.”

“Bullshit,” Ryan says immediately. He’s snapped to full attention now, Shane can tell. The background noises get quieter, as if Ryan’s walked down the hall or shut himself in his downstairs bathroom.

“No bullshit,” Shane says. “I mean, yes, it’s bullshit, but they did. I got an email from David. I guess the graphics editing costs _aren’t in line with the Q4 budget_."

“But you and Garrett spent months writing that!” Shane’s pleased by how indignant Ryan is on his behalf. It reassures him that he’s right to be upset.

“David said the first season _didn’t perform well enough to offset the cost of production_.”

He can hear the bitterness in his own voice, the way he’s framing everything as if in sarcastic air quotes. Ryan must be able to as well, because he asks, a little sharply, “Where are you?”

“Well I’m not about to step into traffic or anything, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“No, just—do you want to get a drink or something?”

Shane thinks about it. He does want to get a drink and vent, but he also wants to stew, and it’s hard to stew with maximum effectiveness in public. It tends to bring everybody down with you.

“Can you come over here?” he asks. He wouldn’t ordinarily invite Ryan over like this, on a Friday night when Ryan’s obviously already got plans, but he also thinks drinking alone is a bad precedent to set. It’s the kind of coping mechanism that becomes a habit too easily, if you let it.

“I—yeah, man, of course,” Ryan says, and if he’s surprised to have been asked, he hides it well. “I’ll bring a six pack.”

“Don’t drive,” Shane hastens to say before hanging up. He knows Ryan knows, but he’s got to say it anyway.

“Roger that.”

Shane unlocks his front door so he doesn’t have to get up to let Ryan in, and then he pours himself an unspecified number of fingers of bourbon to catch up. He lays stretched out on his couch, head tipped back over the far arm, and stares at the ceiling. He focuses all of his attention on trying to pour the drink into his open mouth without spilling, and soon things are a little fuzzier and more indistinct, all his hurt feelings less sharp.

“This is _bullshit_!” Ryan says again when he barges into Shane’s apartment unannounced and without knocking about half an hour later.

“You’re telling me.” Shane abruptly sits up straight, going dizzy when all the blood races out of his head again. He brings his glass up to his temple so the cool sweat from the ice can ground him. “They’re never going to let us do anything ever again if it isn’t at least as successful as Unsolved, and nothing we do will ever be as successful as Unsolved.”

“We should just, like, Thelma and Louise it, dude,” Ryan says, pouring himself a drink from Shane’s makeshift bar cart.

“What, hop in a car and drive until we—” Shane sends his hand sailing through the air, mimicking a car going over a cliff.

“No! Jesus. No…you know. Fuckin’ get out while the getting’s good. Go rogue.”

“What would we do?”

“Fucking…dunno. Rob banks.”

“That’s Bonnie and Clyde.”

“Oh right. Uh. Meet a young Brad Pitt.”

“Oh god, dibs,” Shane says without thinking, too drunk to care that he’s being indiscreet.

Ryan looks at him over the rim of his glass, eyebrows raised—just the briefest of pauses while he decides what to do with that. Then he shakes his head, grinning. “All yours, bud.”

He pours them each a shot.

Shane gets drunker than he means to that night. He gets drunk enough that his anger fades into melancholy, and then even further into a kind of boneless, carefree affection. 

He thinks Ryan’s been matching him shot for shot, but somehow Ryan doesn’t seem as drunk. Probably because Ryan has built up, over many years, the alcohol tolerance of a much larger man, whereas Shane’s a two-beers-and-home-by-eleven kind of guy usually.

“Come on, big guy,” Ryan says, prodding Shane in the lower back to get him down the hall to his bedroom, nudging at the backs of Shane’s legs with his knee. Ryan corrals Shane all the way into his bedroom, and when Shane sees the bed he gets himself the rest of the way there.

“Oh god, that’s good,” he groans as he stretches out, realizing as soon as his head hits the pillow that he’s bone-tired, weary from a long week made longer by disappointment.

“Shane,” Ryan says, and he must in fact be plenty drunk because he’s giggling up a storm when he tugs fruitlessly on Shane’s pants leg. “Shane, you’re still in your work, uh—your work _chinos_. Don’t sleep in ‘em.”

“If you wanted in my pants so badly you could have just asked,” Shane mumbles, but his hands fall to the zip of his chinos so he can wriggle out of them and kick them off the side of the bed. After a moment’s futile struggle he pulls his t-shirt up and over his head too.

Ryan cracks up, bent at the waist, his hands braced on his thighs. “Could have asked!” he wheezes out. “Like that’s a normal thing—like I could—like we would—"

“Hey baby,” Shane says, slurring a little as he rolls over onto his side and pats the bed. “Wanna hunt for ghouls in my pants? See, it’s not that hard. Well, I mean—or _is_ it.”

“You just took off your pants and I saw with my own two eyeballs that they were a ghoul-free zone.”

“It takes heaps of energy to manifest physically, Ryan, or so you keep telling me. You’ve never been bothered about their failure to manifest before. Why should my pants-ghosts be any different?”

“Manifest this, asshole.” Ryan takes a running leap and jumps on the bed next to him. He lands half on top of him, forcing a loud _oof_ out of Shane as he rolls towards the wall to make room.

“Fuck, you’re heavy,” Shane says, rubbing his shoulder where Ryan landed. “You’re like—you’re tiny, but compact. You’re like tungsten. You’re a little tungsten man.”

“What the fuck?” Ryan turns his head to look at Shane. His face is very pink from laughing, his pupils huge and dilated from the alcohol and the dim light sneaking in from the hallway where they didn’t bother to close the door.

“Tungsten is very dense,” Shane tries to explain. He knows it made sense to him when he said it.

“_You’re_ dense,” Ryan says, but there’s no bite to it. He ducks his head back down into the pillow, burrowing down with a soft noise of pleasure, and Shane has the urge to touch him again.

Even very drunk he knows better, though. Instead he just smiles and rolls onto his back, so he doesn’t have to look at Ryan anymore, so close and so flushed.

“Thanks for this,” Shane says. “Thanks for being mad with me. Not to be a child about it, but it really does seem wildly unfair.”

As if he’s a mind-reader, Ryan reaches out with an uncoordinated flop of his arm. It lands on Shane’s chest and wiggles its way up as if unattached to its owner, like Thing from the Addams Family. It finds the pronounced bone of his left clavicle and traces a finger along the ridge of it.

“It _is_ unfair,” Ryan says. “That show was your thing, and it was really good. Like…so good.”

“Yeah?” Shane can’t pay attention to anything but the unprecedented warmth of Ryan’s hand on him, and the giveaway thump of his own telltale heart beneath it.

“Yeah, it was, you know, the first season was funny and smart and the graphics were great, and the bits were—were _funny_, I said that already but it’s double true, and, uh. I liked all the props.” He’s rambling now, but Shane could listen to Ryan ramble in this vein for a good long while yet. “And it really fucking sucks that people won’t get to see more of it.”

“Thank you,” Shane says again, quiet. He’s touched that Ryan is here to be indignant with him, so he doesn’t have to do it alone. “And thanks for offering to spirit me away in a powder blue ’66 Ford Thunderbird.”

“Any time you wanna go, dude, we’ll go,” Ryan mumbles into Shane’s pillow, already most of the way asleep. “Right off the cliff. However you want it.”

Shane’s last conscious thought before he falls asleep—one he won’t even acknowledge having because it’s so terrifying, so treacherous, so antithetical to his own self-preservation—is that he wants it all the ways.

*****

**+1 time he wasn’t joking, not even a little bit  
**(October 2018)

At least Ryan does him the courtesy of telling him first, and in private.

Shane appreciates the chance to absorb the news without other people watching to see how he’s taking it. Keeping himself expressionless for Ryan alone is hard enough.

Does he wish Ryan hadn’t dropped this bombshell right after Shane spent a full ten minutes being continuously dive-bombed by a room full of bats? Absolutely.

“What?” Shane asks him, thinking at first that he’s misheard. He’s still very distracted, after all. From all the bats. Also, Ryan’s sitting facing away from him on the other hotel bed, making him hard to hear and impossible to read.

Ryan shifts and turns to look at him, though he doesn’t quite meet Shane’s eye. “I’m leaving,” he says. “I’m quitting Buzzfeed at the end of the year. I—even Katie doesn’t know yet, so don’t—I know you’re supposed to tell your boss first, but I needed you to know.”

“Oh,” Shane says. That’s it, that’s all he can muster. Just _oh_. 

“—thinking about it for a long time, and I know the timing isn’t amazing, but—”

And Ryan’s still talking low and fast, scratching his fingers up his jaw like he can’t stop, like the motion is all that’s powering his ability to speak.

“Is it because of all the bats?” Shane butts in, still not quite following. “Because I’m not wedded to the bats. We can lose the bats.”

Ryan looks at him, unreadably blank. “No, it’s not the bats.”

Shane thinks, but doesn’t say: _is it me? _

Instead he says, “Okay. Well, wow. When?”

“End of the year,” Ryan says. “Well, my last day will be November 30, because I’ve got over three weeks of vacation time they’ll have to pay out if they don’t let me take it in December.”

It’s soon, it’s so fucking soon. Fewer than two months, in fact, and it’ll take them all the way up to the end of the upcoming season of Supernatural.

“Well, congratulations, man,” Shane says when he can unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “That’s really exciting. Do you—did you get a new job, or…?”

Ryan shrugs. “No, I’m just ready for a change, you know? I want time to think. I want to have options, and the freedom to take on other projects when I want. Maybe something that involves no bats at all, for a change.”

“And the show?” Shane trails off. He holds his breath.

“I’d like to keep doing Unsolved on contract if they’ll let me, and I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t,” Ryan says, scooting up the bed. He’s got his hand stretched out on the bed in Shane’s direction, like he’s extending an olive branch. “I’m—I still haven’t proven to you that ghosts are real, which I hope will be my _true_ legacy, so—shame to give up on it now. If you still want to.”

“Yeah,” Shane says, his heart thumping. “Yeah, of course. I’m in if you are.”

“So really it won’t change things that much,” Ryan says. “I mean, I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I’ll step back on the research and writing. I’m happy to film and do the postmortems and stuff.”

Shane smiles and nods and says all the stuff you’re supposed to say: _I’m happy for you; proud of you, man; let me know if you need a reference._ But the truth is that he’s reeling. No matter what Ryan says, it’ll change everything. The show might continue, but it won’t be _right_.

“I can’t wait to see what you do next,” Shane says. It’s late, nearly two in the morning, and between the late shoot and the bats and Ryan’s news he’s feeling wrung out. “I’m sure it’ll be something great.”

“I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

“It’ll be weird not to work together all the time, huh?” 

“I’ve been thinking a lot about that, actually. Uh—well. What if we…” but Ryan trails off then, into mumbling uncertainty.

“What if we what?”

“Never mind,” Ryan says. “Nothing. It’s nothing. Nope. Never…uh. No.”

Which seems, to Shane, like a substantial overreaction to an innocuous question.

“Okay,” he says, waiting. “Well…okay.”

“Okay.” Ryan nods, crossing his arms over his chest. He’s got a weird stubborn look on his face, and Shane doesn’t know what he could possibly be feeling stubborn about. There’s clearly some kind of internal struggle going on that Shane doesn’t feel entitled to be a part of unless Ryan invites him to be.

“We should talk about BUN before you leave,” Shane says, “if it’ll be me at the helm from now on. I’m not really sure what to do about it without you.”

“You’ll take good care of her,” Ryan says. “I wouldn’t trust her to anybody else.” He says _her_ and not _it,_ as if the channel is an old warship being hauled into early retirement after taking one too many shots to the hull.

Shane’s not sure he has the heart for it without Ryan, is all. The Unsolved Network was supposed to be their thing, theirs together: their playground for all the weird, interesting content there was no room for on the main channel, a home for all the oddballs and misfits who craved stories. It never quite lived up to its potential or became the thing they once imagined it could be. Shane’s confident that now it never will.

_We still had things we wanted to do_, Shane wants to say. _We’re not finished yet. _

“But I’m not finished with you yet,” is how it comes out instead. Shane flinches at how creepy it sounds, maybe even a little whiny, but Ryan only laughs.

“It sounds like you’re cooking me over an open fire and you’re mad I’m still a little raw in the middle. See, this is why they think you’re a demon. It’s because you say shit like that.”

“No, it’s because I look damn good in red.” Shane jokes because he can’t _not_ joke. It’s the only way he knows how to be, tonight, that will prevent him from tipping over into the kind of uncharacteristically overdramatic moroseness that will embarrass them both.

“You look _okay_ in red. Let’s not oversell it.” Ryan starts to burrow under the covers, readying himself to sleep. He makes kind of a show of it, fluffing his pillows and arranging the blankets just so. “And I’m not finished with you yet either. You psycho.”

*

The wrap party for season five of Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural is also the Ryan Bergara wrap party.

They’ll be filming True Crime together in February, so it’s not _really_ a wrap, but it feels that way to Shane.

The whole team goes out the Friday night after the final postmortem ends, which also happens to be Ryan’s last day at Buzzfeed as a video producer. Shane muscles through the day, trying not to grit his teeth every time someone stops by their desks to give Ryan a hug or a bro-handshake goodbye.  
  
Curly swings by looking about as inconsolable as Shane feels, which is itself some small consolation. Shane takes a degree of comfort from Curly’s hangdog face as he gives Ryan a squeeze around the middle with one hand and blatantly palms Ryan’s ass with the other.

“One for the road, _chero_,” he tells Ryan—who, unless Shane’s much mistaken, seems a little emotional about it himself.

“This, the final grope,” Shane narrates under his breath, appropriating the gravitas of a Ken Burns documentary.

“You’ll have to film an episode of Unsolved with us next year,” Ryan says, ignoring Shane.

Curly’s face lights up. “I’m penciling in a rockin’ threeway on my Outlook calendar as we speak. Not that I’d ever tell you gentlemen how to do your jobs, but I’ve always wanted to be spitroasted in a haunted hotel. Maybe, like, one from the ‘20s. With a big art deco chandelier.”

“It’s good to have goals,” Shane cuts in when Ryan, fire-engine red and choking on nervous giggles, can’t manage a response. “Although that one was—_alarmingly_ specific.”

The whole team crams into a couple of cars and heads to the restaurant. Shane, in a strange fit of romantic nostalgia such that he is not usually partial to, booked the private heated patio at The Little Door. It’s a charming French-meets-Mediterranean bistro in Beverly Grove, twinkling candles sitting atop pristine white tablecloths, wrought-iron archways with their doors flung wide so you can hear the gentle burble of noise from the main dining room.

There’s an upright self-playing piano in the corner merrily plunking out a tune, all lightness and airy major fifths. It’s strictly Bach and Handel for this crowd, even though on the inside Shane feels like he could go for something minor-keyed and melancholy. His heart craves a Chopin nocturne.

After dinner, Shane seats himself at the piano bench with a glass of white wine to watch Ryan make the rounds, talking and laughing with all the people who have spent the last couple of years helping them make Unsolved a success.

Shane doesn’t play, but he likes to rest his fingers on the keys and feel them move of their own accord under his fingertips. It gives him the unearned sensation of having done something, when in fact he’s done nothing at all.

He looks down to watch for a moment, and when he looks up Ryan’s standing over him.

“And he says ghosts aren’t real,” Ryan quips. “Then what’s making the piano keys move, Shane? Huh? Huh?”

“Uh, a machine?”

“Nope, it’s definitely a little piano ghost.”

“Curled up under the lid, plucking all the strings.” Shane pulls his hands off the keyboard to mime plucking at the air like a piano gremlin.

Ryan pokes him in the side, “Scoot,” and Shane slides over to make room on the small bench.

“I should probably get up and make a toast about how great you are,” Shane says, trying not to sound sullen. This is, after all, supposed to be a party. “Make a big deal about how we’re all here because of you, how it won’t be the same in the office without your loud-ass goofy laugh, and so on and so forth. But I’m having trouble talking myself up to it.”

“Shame,” Ryan says. “I’d have liked to hear that. D’you think you’d, like, experience a feeling? Manfully squeeze out a single tear in my honor?”

“In your honor, I’d experience one single feeling,” Shane says. “But it would be a big ’un. Nobody needs to see that.”

Ryan laughs at that, head thrown back, hand clapped on his thigh in an involuntary gesture of unselfconscious pleasure.

“Can I say something?” he asks Shane, taking Shane’s wine glass from him and stealing the last swig before depositing the empty glass on the lid of the piano. “For the road?”

“For the road,” Shane scoffs. “You’re quitting your day job, not dying. We’ll still—see each other. We’ll still hang out, and do the show, and…”

It feels like Shane’s trying to convince himself, and it isn’t working. He’s got this growing suspicion that in six months he’s going to hate his job, and resent Ryan for leaving him to do it alone, and he’s going to have to start all over finding happiness somewhere else. 

“Shut up for a minute, okay!” Ryan wipes his nose with the back of his hand, and then he wipes his palms on his pants, and it’s this nervous consternation as much as anything that makes Shane fall quiet. “I could have—I wanted to before, but. I thought, I thought I _might_, some time, but—it’s hard when you work together, it’s stressful, it’s, you know. It goes bad sometimes, right?”

“Right,” Shane says, not following the word salad but wanting to be encouraging.

“And, like, okay. Sometimes I’d look at you and I’d be like, I’m just gonna! I’m _gonna_, so I can _know_, and it’ll be fine, and even if it’s not fine now it’ll eventually be fine, the way things with you always are. Only then I always chicken out because I’m _like this_.”

“Do you need, like, some water or something, because—?”

“Shh, shut up, let me—but now we aren’t going to work together as much, and that sucks, but maybe that means I can finally, you know, settle it—”

Shane opens his mouth to ask something like _settle what, Ryan, Jesus fucking Christ. _He doesn’t get the chance, though, because Ryan is leaning in very close. And then Ryan is kissing him in full view of about a dozen of their coworkers.

There’s a hoot from somewhere off to the side, a few rogue snickers, before Shane shuts out all external noises and focuses only on this: on this one thing he has wanted without conscious wanting for so long that finally getting it feels like a secret new part of himself rumbling to life inside him, like a third eye springing open.

Ryan’s mouth fits against his, his lips warm and firm and insistent. Ryan’s back, when Shane finds it under his hand, is straight with conviction. He kisses like he had to fight with himself to get there—but now that he has, having wrestled himself across the final Rubicon of his fear, he is sure and steady.

It can’t last for long, no more than five seconds. It is a simple kiss. It doesn’t make promises, or convey any deeper meaning, or say goodbye. It is just one short, achingly lovely press of one smiling mouth to another. One _almost-something_, a cautious slip of lips and tongue as they feel each other out, thrilling and terrifying in the way of all first kisses with someone new. 

Shane doesn’t have time to feel anything but surprise, and then a fleeting sort of relief. Surprise, that Ryan was the one to do it, and so publicly. Relief, that Shane hasn’t been imagining things out of desperation to see them. That he wasn’t the only one to get a contact high from years of friendship and casual intimacy and _creating_.

Ryan pulls back. He looks around, startled, as if he’s baffled to find there are other people there. To their credit, no one claps or heckles. The room’s buzzing with side conversations, a group of people determined to give them privacy in a crowded room by pretending very hard that they’re not paying attention.

Shane’s phone vibrates in his pocket with a text that he is sure, without checking, will be from Curly. News travels fast.

“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a wrap on Ryan Bergara,” Shane jokes weakly. “Way to drop the mic on your way out.”

Ryan snorts. He wipes his mouth again, and his hand lingers to cup his own cheek where it’s flushed and warm. “Shut up, okay. I’ve been wondering for ages what—whether it would be—nice.”

“I thought it was nice,” Shane says cautiously.

“Well, so did I.”

“Well, good.”

“Good!”

“So we agree. We’re in agreement.”

Ryan nods.

“So it’s…settled?” Shane asks. He doesn’t feel particularly settled, but he also knows that sometimes you just have to kiss a person and you don’t necessarily _mean_ anything by it. Ryan might well consider it settled.

Also, Shane suspects that the crushing pressure of wanting to do it will have prevented Ryan from sparing a thought for what might happen once he did.

“I guess it’s satisfying on a narrative level,” Ryan says, sounding dubious. “Like punctuation, you know? Capping off the end of an era. I don’t know yet if it’s a question mark or an exclamation point.”

“So it’s an interrobang?”

“A what?”

“You know, that guy that’s a wobbly hybrid of both, all squished together.”

“_Interro_—that is not a thing,” Ryan says. “You made that shit up.”

“No, I didn’t!” Shane pulls out his phone to prove it. “See? It’s real. It’s like—it’s the CatDog of punctuation.”

And then they’re bent over Shane’s phone, looking up photos, arguing about whether the interrobang is legitimate standardized punctuation or not, and somehow they manage to skate right on past the hard part.

Shane sees why Ryan held out for so long, why he watched and waited without touching, why he never spoke his curiosity into being until now. Because next Monday Shane will go back to work and Ryan won’t be there.

It buys them time. They might not see each other for weeks or months, so there’s no pressure to figure it all out right now, urgently, before it blows everything up. There’s already so little left of normal, so little left to explode.

“_Oh_,” Shane says, putting something together. He sets his phone down on the piano. “This is the thing you were trying to ask me, that night in Yuma. After you told me you were leaving. You went all funny and stammery and when I pushed you on it you snapped shut like clam.”

Ryan smiles. The lanterns dangling from the tree branches above them catch and glint in his eyes, dancing flares of light that make him look mischievous and enigmatic and handsome.

“Sure,” he says.

*

At the end of the third week of December, right before everybody breaks for the holidays (cowards), Shane and Katie get called upstairs. _Upstairs_.

David lays it out to them plain: Buzzfeed’s investors must see a return. Buzzfeed must make a profit. To do so, Buzzfeed will be laying off as many as twenty percent of its employees in the new year.

“We wouldn’t get rid of Unsolved, of course,” David says. “There are a few properties that are reliable moneymakers. It’s just that there are a lot of…redundancies.”

“Redundancies,” Shane repeats.

“A lot of people with the same skills doing the same work across properties,” he clarifies. “If we could pare down—”

“Pare down?”

“If we could hire some of those folks on as contractors, we’d save an enormous amount in benefits alone.”

Katie looks at him, and then at Shane. “You want to fire people and then hire them back on temp contracts for less money and no benefits?”

David makes a vague equivocating gesture that confirms to Shane that’s exactly what he wants to do. Shane feels sick.

“I need the two of you to take a good long look at your team and let me know who isn’t essential.”

Shane thinks they are all essential, every last one of them, down to every social media coordinator and editor. When he and Ryan pushed for promotions and for executive producer credits, this is not the kind of miserable responsibility they were asking for. Shane’s not prepared make choices about peoples’ lives, their livelihoods. 

He thinks about TJ, currently on parental leave with his firstborn son—about the benefits that made it possible, and what losing them would mean—and he wants to throw something.

David leaves them with strict instructions not to tell anyone, so naturally the first thing Shane does is call Ryan from his car.

As it rings through, he wonders if this is how it will be from now on: him calling Ryan to vent about each new frustration and Ryan getting a little further away from it every time, until eventually the circle of their shared problems and mutual acquaintances is too narrow to bother calling him at all.

“Hey, what’s up?” Ryan says. He must be eating dinner, because it comes out _hey shup_ around a mouthful of something. Shane assumes this whole month has been like that for Ryan: a series of meals bleeding into one another, with only the occasional break for sleep or a concert or a game of Mario Kart.

“They’re making me fire people.”

“What?”

“Buzzfeed. Well, they’re making me pick people for them to fire, which is functionally the same thing.”

“Fuck them,” Ryan says. “How many people?”

Shane can barely say it, that’s how many people. It’s _so_ many people. It’s going to be carnage. “Every team in Video has to cut by a third.”

“A _third_?” Ryan’s incredulous. Shane can hear the agitated scrape of a bar stool against his kitchen floor. He imagines Ryan standing up to pace and manages a smile even around his outrage. “No fucking wonder they were so amped when I asked to go contract.”

“Yeah, David got so excited talking about cutting benefits today that I was afraid he was gonna bust through the crotch of his front-pleated khakis. What do I—Ryan.”

“Yeah?”

“Please tell me what to do.”

The line’s quiet for a long moment while Ryan thinks. Shane can see him chewing his lip as he thinks, tapping his fingertips along the granite of his kitchen island.

“I mean—you don’t have to do it. They can’t make you give them any names.”

“Fuck!” Shane yells as a car merges in front of him without a blinker, cutting it so close he has to slam on the brakes. He honks, holding down the horn longer than is strictly necessary to vent his feelings. “Sorry. Yeah, I guess, but then they’ll just fire people indiscriminately.”

“Sorry if this is pushy to ask, but do you even want to be there, dude? Is it worth it? Because if you’re not happy…”

The honest answer is that Shane doesn’t and he isn’t. He’s there because in the not-too-distant past he loved his job, and it’s hard to reconcile that love with the growing discontent he feels now. He’s there because he doesn’t know what else he’d be doing otherwise.

“A captain goes down with his ship, right?”

“No, Shane, they don’t,” Ryan says sharply. “I didn’t. You could—you can do anything you want. There’s so much shit you’re great at.”

Ryan’s pretty good at aggressive pep talks. Shane doesn’t feel better, exactly, but he is breathing easier. His hands have slackened on the steering wheel, enough that his knuckles are no longer white from the grip.

“Except all I want is what we were doing this time last year,” Shane says. If he sounds tired, it’s because he is fucking exhausted. “I want to film the stupid spooky stuff, and the history stuff, and the one-offs like the Knott’s video. I want to make what I want to make. I don’t want to fire people.” _And I want to look over and see you sitting next to me,_ he doesn’t say, although he wants that too.

“We could do all that,” Ryan says. “You and me. We _were_ doing all that.”

“What?”

“You’ve got savings. I’ve got savings. We’ve got some skills between us. We’ve got an audience. Why not?”

All Shane can see ahead is the angry red of brake lights, snaking along the interstate for miles. At this rate it’s going to take him an hour and a half to get home.

Shane laughs. “We don’t know the first thing about running—what, a business? A company? It’s not just the fun creative parts, Ryan. It’s all the shit we suck at too, the paper-pushing and the logistics. We’re not horny for spreadsheets, remember?”

“Well six months ago I wasn’t horny for you either, but here we are,” Ryan snaps.

Shane nearly runs his car off the road.

“Wha—” he stammers. “Well, wh—uh—what—”

“All I’m saying is that a person can learn and change and shit. Taking some Excel tutorials probably won’t be the weirdest personal growth I experience this year.”

Shane shakes his head, still processing. Then he remembers that Ryan can’t see him over Bluetooth. “You really shouldn’t say things like that to a man when he’s driving, you know. If you turn on the news and see a ten-car pile-up on the 101, it’s your fault.”

“Dude, it’s 2018. Who _turns on _the_ news_?”

“You know what I mean. Listen, I appreciate the thought—like, really, I do. It’s a lovely idea. I’m both touched and, to be honest, aroused. I just don’t think it’s realistic.”

“You don’t think we can do it?” Ryan asks. He doesn’t sound crushed or anything. More curious.

“I don’t think we can do it,” Shane confirms.

They hang up not long after that, with promises to make plans to see each other in the New Year.

It will have been over a month since they last were face to face, and Shane’s entirely certain he hasn’t gone that long without seeing Ryan in the four years they’ve known each other.

He feels strangely lonely. He still regularly turns to Ryan’s old desk at work, to ask his advice, to tell him some stupid joke, whatever—and to find him not sitting there feels like losing some small but essential function that Shane always took for granted before. It’s like suddenly being unable to smell a pot roast slow-cooking on the stove, or losing the ability to hear a certain chord: not strictly necessary for living a happy, fulfilling life, and yet having had it, he misses it enormously.

Shane goes home to Chicago for Christmas. He doesn’t tell any of his family what’s up. He applies to a couple of digital media production jobs—at Vox, at Mashable, at Gimlet. It’s not likely the financial outlook there will be much rosier, but maybe a change of scene will be enough.

On Christmas Day he gets a text from Ryan: _merry christmas you filthy animal._

Shane texts back a picture of Obi halfway up the Christmas tree, all tangled up in the lights, and gets back the hearts-eyes emoji for his trouble. So that’s something.

Usually Shane would stay in Chicago through New Year’s, but he’s not feeling optimistic about 2019. It’s hard to sit around with friends and loved ones, making resolutions and plans for the coming year, when he’s feeling more directionless and discontent than he has in ages.

So instead he flies back to LA to ring in the new year alone.

*

When he gets home, there’s a package shoved in his mailbox.

It’s about the size and dimensions of a large mailing envelope, flexible, shoddily wrapped with gold and red wrapping paper.

The paper has little penguins on it. It’s very cute and very cheesy and it looks like a sixth grader both selected the paper and completed the wrap job. There’s no postage on it, which means it must have been hand-delivered—which in turn means the deliverer must have sweet-talked Shane’s landlord into unlocking the mailbox.

There’s a gift tag on it. The “from” line is blank.

The “to” line reads THE BIG GUY, which means Shane doesn’t need to be told who it’s from.

They’ve actually never exchanged Christmas presents before, not properly. In past years Shane’s always indulged in a flurry of December holiday baking, cookies and pies and candy, and sent Ryan home with a plate of them. One year Ryan gave Shane a Christmas card with Micki and Dori on it, obviously custom-ordered by his mom.

Shane hasn’t the slightest idea what could be inside. He runs his fingers along the seams where the wrapping paper’s been taped, appreciating the effort if not the full final effect. Then he reaches under the tape to gently pop it open without tearing the paper.

It is exactly what it felt like: a large mailing envelope. Shane undoes the little metal clasp and pulls out…a manila file folder.

“What is this, a Matryoshka doll of office supplies?” he mutters, opening the folder in turn to reveal a packet of papers, surprisingly hefty, neatly held together with a binder clip.

As Shane rifles through the pages he discovers they are as follows, in exact accordance with the table of contents:

  * One sample Articles of Incorporation form, state of California, annotated;
  * One sample Statement of Information form, annotated;
  * One copy of Ryan’s contract with Buzzfeed for Unsolved, covered in explanatory post-it notes;
  * One draft budget, 2019-2020 FY;
  * One draft budget, 2020-2021 FY;
  * Seven pages of meticulous notes about the relative merits and pitfalls of at least three different business structures;
  * One draft three-year financial forecast;
  * Ten pages of text about federal income tax law, marked up;
  * One tentative timeline for a 2019 production schedule;
  * Five financial commitments from low-to-medium level sponsors;
  * Two soft commitments of serious investment, totaling $300,000; and
  * One mostly-blank piece of paper, on which three names are written.

The sheer amount of information contained in the folder makes Shane’s head spin. The amount of work and time it must represent—Ryan can’t have done all this in the last couple of weeks, no way.

Shane flips through the paperwork to one of the emails. It’s correspondence between Ryan and Steve Chen, one of the co-founders of YouTube, and it’s dated September 26, 2018. He skims it.

_My business partner and I have a proven track record of success on the YouTube platform…_

_…Years of collaborative digital media experience…_

_...Totaling over 700 million views…_

It is, Shane has to admit, quite a pitch.

The timeline document is dated September 10. The ‘19-‘20 draft budget is dated August 2. As Shane had suspected from the size of it, this folder represents months of work and research and planning. That Ryan did all this on the side while juggling a full-time job and an exhausting travel schedule for the show is remarkable. Shane can envision him, up late into the night in front of his laptop, pen in his mouth as he concentrates.

And then Shane turns to the very last page, and he stares at it, at the names written there, and he finally understands that it’s not just a dossier of research.

It’s a gift-wrapped _proposal_. It’s a proposal of work marriage, delivered from bended knee, hand outstretched. As grand a romantic gesture as anyone could ever want. 

Shane sits down at his dining room table, the papers spread out in front of him. They cover pretty much every square inch of the table. He wants to read every page.

All that work. All that time. All those hopes for something they could build together, if only Ryan could convince Shane to come along.

Shane shoots off a text with shaking hands: _Come over here, you madman._

Ryan responds: _oh hey you’re back early. why whats up_,_ did santy claus leave something under the tree for u? ;) _

Shane: _Seriously, come over._

Ryan: _cya in 40_

*

The thing Shane can’t quite reconcile is the timing. The earliest document in Ryan’s mad little research pile is dated almost five months ago, the first of August, 2018. 

In June, they were planning for the launch of the Buzzfeed Unsolved Network. Ryan was full speed ahead on that project, they both were, with the highest of hopes for it. But by August, only a couple weeks after the official launch of BUN, something had changed for Ryan. He was already making plans, serious plans, to leave.

Shane can’t figure it out.

And then he remembers there was one thing. One thing changed. He logs into his work email on his phone, searching until he finds what he’s looking for. 

_July 28, 2018 5:58 pm  
From: David S  
Subj: “Ruining History” – status update_

By Shane’s calculations, he’d learned that Ruining History was being canceled that day, a Friday. He’d called Ryan that night. Ryan had come over, gotten him drunk, listened to him complain. He’d slept tucked close at Shane’s back, breathing heavy at his neck.

And then Ryan had gone home the next morning to do—_this_.

When Ryan knocks, Shane gets up to answer the door so fast that he trips over his own feet and goes sprawling hard into the side of the coffee table. He’s still limping and clutching his knee when he lets Ryan in.

“Happy to see you too,” Ryan jokes as he comes in. “Or were you on your way out?”

His eyes swivel about the room, taking in the spread of papers on the table and Shane’s luggage in the hallway and finally Shane himself. Shane hadn’t realized it until just now, but he’s still wearing his shoes and jacket, having been too preoccupied by Ryan’s dossier when he got home to take them off.

He sheepishly sheds them now, kicking his shoes off into the corner, and Ryan does the same.

“How did you get there so fast?” Shane asks.

“Get where? Here? Traffic was light.”

“No, _there_. You knew the minute they canceled Ruining History that Buzzfeed wasn’t going to be what we needed it to be,” Shane says. “You were already thinking about how we could do it better. You kept trying to tell me and I wouldn’t listen.”

Ryan shrugs. “That show was dope. If they couldn’t cut you some slack on that, it was never gonna be about more than the bottom line to them. And if they were sweating the bottom line that much, I figured a shitstorm had to be coming. I wanted us to have a plan when it did.”

He gestures in the direction of the papers on the table. “They dicked you around, and they dicked us around on BUN, and any other company would do the same thing without a second thought. IP is everything.”

“IP is everything,” Shane repeats, still kind of numb with shock about it all. “And—and that night in Yuma, you didn’t want to _kiss_ me. You wanted to ask me this.”

No wonder Ryan was scared to ask, no wonder he chickened out. This is bigger than a kiss, so very much bigger. This is a commitment. This is sitting down together and making the conscious decision to tie yourself to another person for years: to vow to pool your time and your money and your creativity and see what you can make together. That’s as big as it gets.

“I did want to kiss you. But I figured I’d have to choose between kissing you and working with you, because you’d never want to be—” Ryan’s voice wavers but he pushes through it, “—you’d never want to be with someone _and_ own a business with them, that’s so—”

“Cliché?”

“_Risky_,” Ryan says. “Like, who does that? Who would go looking for another way to fuck it all up? Isn’t that kind of partnership hard enough without complicating it even more with feelings, and—and sex, and—whatever?”

Privately Shane wonders about that _whatever_; about what word Ryan can’t bring himself to say, if he can barrel past _sex_ with no problem.

“I don’t know, it seemed to work out for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.”

Ryan stares at him for a moment. Then he bursts out laughing—loud, surprised hoots that trail off into the characteristic wheeze. “Fuck you, dude, be serious.”

Shane is serious as a heart attack, but he’s not sure he can find the words to say as much. He’s afraid whatever he comes up with will be woefully insufficient. Instead of trying, he stumbles forward to take Ryan’s face in his hands, to pull him close and kiss him on the mouth. Ryan responds immediately under him, pressing his hands into the back pockets of Shane’s jeans, going up on his toes to meet Shane halfway.

“Yes, okay,” Shane says feverishly, ducking his head lower to press his mouth along the sharp line of Ryan’s jaw. “Okay? Yes. I’ll start a stupid company with you. Idiot.”

“I’m sure that’s exactly how Matt said it to Ben.” Ryan hisses when Shane sucks a hickey into the delicate skin of his neck by his ear. Shane thinks that at least he’s aware he’s the Ben.

“Fucking—with your romantic-ass _paperwork_. It’s probably a horrible idea, but whatever. I can’t believe you got me a company for Christmas. Fuck you.”

Shane’s almost mad at how big this is, how _enormous_, how it’s such a monumental decision that they’re definitely going to need to have sex on his couch about it right this second. He’s not sure his body has room for all that enormity, for all that import. He’s not sure where to put it all, these feelings and fears he has about these two life-altering things converging all at once.

He kisses Ryan again. Maybe if he keeps doing that he’ll figure it out. Or maybe he’ll figure it out later, pressing Ryan into the cushions of his couch, rubbing against him in the frantic newness, both of them too desperate and endorphin-stupid to get their pants all the way off. Or perhaps he’ll figure it out tomorrow, when he wakes up to find Ryan in his bed and he remembers he can reach out for him, that he’s allowed.

Or maybe he’ll never figure it out. Maybe he’ll learn to live with the bigness, and accept that everything is _more_ now: that every single thing is a little brighter and louder and scarier and sweeter than the things that came before.

*

Later, basking in the afterglow, Shane remembers.

“Wait here,” he tells Ryan sternly, leaving Ryan to stretch out his bare shoulders and yawn in half-asleep confusion. He stomps down the hall, and he grabs the offending piece of paper, and he stomps back.

“What the fuck,” he asks Ryan, “is this?”

He drops it on Ryan’s face from above, the final piece of paper in the massive stack Ryan gave him. It reads:

**Ryan Bergara, CEO**  
Shane Madej, CEO  
Steven Lim???????????????

Ryan blinks at the page and pulls it away from his face so he can see it properly.

“Oh,” he says, and then he snickers, scratching at the stubble on his jaw and yawning again. “I guess I thought—I don’t know. Doesn’t it seem like Steve’s the kind of person who might be horny for spreadsheets?”

Shane stares at him. “Steven Lim has never known touch of woman or man,” he says. “There’s a one hundred percent chance Steven Lim is horny for _everything_.”

“Jackets from Zara.”

“That upsetting protractor set he carries around with him everywhere in case he finds an angle he just _has_ to measure.”

“The Cleveland Cavaliers.”

“The Lord,” Shane says solemnly.

“Horny for the Lord,” Ryan wheezes. “Stop, shut up, I have to pee. Seriously. I was thinking about people we know who might be interested in coming on board. You keep saying we need someone who’s good at the tedious, awful parts. You know, the Ned.”

“You think Steven might be the Ned?”

“Well, I’m not the Ned, and you’re not the Ned. Somebody’s gotta be the Ned, Shane.”

Shane thinks about it. He’s heard worse ideas. Steven’s been in a weird place since he moved to New York, half in the Buzzfeed orbit and half out of it, one ear to the ground for new opportunities. He’s practical, with a mind for logistics and schedules.

“I’m not sure the world is ready for such an ambitious Unsolved/Worth It crossover event,” Shane says. “We’d be like the Dino Megazord from Power Rangers.”

“Oh god, I’ve got the weirdest boner right now,” Ryan cackles, clutching his stomach.

“Whatever shall we do about that,” Shane says, pinning Ryan’s wrists to his sides, tumbling over on top of him to figure it out.

*

Things move pretty quickly after that. They put their heads together and, using Ryan’s massive jumble of research, write a proper prospectus. They email it to Steven in New York in early January—he doesn’t get the whole romantic nesting doll proposal treatment, which some small petty part of Shane finds gratifying—and then a couple of days later they sit down with him on a video conference call.

“This math is surprisingly…correct,” Steven says, looking over his glasses at the proposed budget.

“Your surprise is noted,” Shane says. “And the implicit insult is acknowledged and accepted.”

Ryan scowls. “I used to do the budget for Unsolved, you know, back in the first couple of seasons.”

“Back then the budget for Unsolved was sixty bucks for a few gallons of gas, lunch, and the latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint,” Steven points out. Which—fair.

They hash it out. Shane and Ryan try to answer Steven’s many questions as best they can without pushing too hard for an answer. Shane’s keenly aware that it is a massive commitment, a massive risk, that bears serious thinking through. Fortunately Steven is, of the three of them, perhaps the least risk-averse by nature.

Of course there’s still that one big question left to resolve, the one Steven—across the country and out of the Buzzfeed gossip loop, if he was ever indeed in that loop in the first place—doesn’t even know he should be asking.

“Well, I’ve got to talk to my accountant,” Steven says at the tail end of the conversation. “And my parents. And I’ve got to pray about it, of course.”

“Of course,” Shane says, forcing himself to not make eye contact with Ryan.

“But I think I might be in? I don’t know, guys, this is pretty crazy. But exciting. I’m glad you came to me.”

“One last thing, Steve,” Ryan says. “You should probably know if you’re coming on board, so you can make an informed decision.”

“Mmm?” Steven’s not fully paying attention; he’s looking at something on his screen that isn’t Shane and Ryan, clacking away at his keyboard as if answering an email. Shane bets he’s about to be paying _real_ close attention.

“Okay, well, funny story. Shane and I are sort of—together…ish.”

“Romantically entangled—”

“Doin’ it—”

“Dancing the horizontal tango!”

“Great, okay, perfect, good talk, thanks, Steve, talk to you soon, byeeeeee!” Ryan gets out all in a rush. Steven looks directly into his laptop’s camera, the shock written all over his face. His mouth forms a perfect comical O, like a cartoon.

“And…freeze frame!” Shane pulls back, framing Steven’s frozen surprised expression with his hands. Ryan ends the video call before Steven can say another word. “Man, what a twist ending. He’s gonna love that.”

“Yeah, nailed it.”

A few minutes later Ryan gets a text from Steven: _You may not engage in sexual intercourse in our office._

“You know, when he calls it that I don’t even want to,” Shane says, reading over Ryan’s shoulder.

“Chilling,” Ryan agrees.

And just like that, with no fanfare or fuss, they have a company.

*


End file.
